New York (AFP)
Spotify announced on Tuesday that it had acquired audio salon specialist Betty Labs, which will serve as a vehicle for development in this booming sector, popularized by the Clubhouse platform.
In the wake of podcasts, "live audio", which offers live broadcasts and conferences or conversations between Internet users, all in audio only format, has been on the rise for about a year, driven by the Clubhouse application.
It offers the possibility of interactions that do not exist with the pre-recorded podcats.
Created in 2018, Betty Labs specialized in this niche and in particular created, in October 2020, the Locker Room application, which organizes live audio exchanges on sport.
Spotify announced Tuesday that it will evolve Locker Room to make it a platform open to "a wider range of creators and fans," according to a statement.
The platform will thus open up to subjects related to music and more broadly to culture, but also to creators from all walks of life.
Among the original investors in Betty Labs was GV, Alphabet's (Google) private equity arm.
At the end of February, Spotify confirmed its ambitions in non-musical audio.
The group has already spent hundreds of millions of dollars to put together an integrated podcast offering, with technology, production, advertising interface and exclusive content.
According to several media, Facebook is currently working on an offer similar to that of Clubhouse.
Entrepreneur Mark Cuban is also preparing his own version, called Fireside.
Formerly of "live audio", the Discord platform, launched in 2015, has already raised $ 479 million, according to the database of the specialist site Crunchbase, and is now valued at around $ 7 billion.
© 2021 AFP